A few weeks ago I wrote a post about how to run the perfect scientific workshop, which most of you thought was a good set of tips (bizarrely, one person was quite upset with the message; I saved him the embarrassment of looking stupid online and refrained from publishing his comment).

As I mentioned at the end of post, the stimulus for the topic was a particularly wonderful workshop 12 of us attended at beautiful Linnaeus Estate on the northern coast of New South Wales (see Point 5 in the ‘workshop tips’ post).

I hate to say it – mainly because it deserves as little attention as possible – but the main reason is that we needed to clean up a bit of rubbish. The rubbish in question being the latest bit of excrescence growing on that accumulating heap produced by a certain team of palaeontologists promulgating their ‘it’s all about the climate or nothing’ broken record.

It still amazes me that the more we look, the more we realise just how important intact ecosystems are for our own well-being. I guess this is why I’m still a scientist.

Our latest paper that just came out today in Nature Geneticsis a bit of a departure for me (again!); I really must not take much credit for this given that it was a huge effort among a big team of people and I played a comparatively minor role. Still, I can definitely say this is one of the more interesting papers I’ve co-authored in a while.

For me the involvement started after Alan Cooper (Director of the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA) asked me for a bit of help with a cool paper he and some of his colleagues were working on. When he told me what the subject was, my initial reaction was (yawn): Dentistry? Teeth? You’ve got to be joking. Why would an ecologist be even remotely interested in that stuff? Then he went into more detail, and I was hooked.

Before I get into that detail, I have to tell you a story about a colleague of mine (name withheld, but true story) who recently went to the dentist to have some routine cleaning and maintenance done. There was nothing particularly special about his visit – no local anaesthetic, no extractions, no caps, and certainly no surgery. Two weeks later he was in the hospital theatre getting his chest cracked open for open-heart surgery. Jesus H. Christ!, I said to myself. Read the rest of this entry »

What’s a ‘bottleneck’? In reference to the form after which it was named, a genetic bottleneck is the genetic diversity aftermath after a population declines to a small size and then later expands. The history of this reduction and subsequent expansion is written in the DNA, because inevitably gene ‘types’ are lost as most individuals shuffle off this mortal coil. In a way, it’s like losing a large population of people who all speak different languages – inevitably, you’d lose entire languages and the recovering population would grow out of a reduced ‘pool’ of languages, resulting in fewer overall surviving languages.

Our workshop focus started, as many scientific endeavours do, rather serendipitously. Several years ago, Jeremy Austin noticed that devils who had died out on the mainland several thousand years ago had a very low genetic diversity, as do modern-day devils surviving in Tasmania. He thought it was odd because they should have had more on the mainland given that was their principal distribution prior to Europeans arriving. He mentioned this in passing to Steve Donnellan one day and Steve announced that he had seem the same pattern in echidnas. Now, echidnas cover most of Australia’s surface, so that was equally odd. Then they decided to look at another widespread species – tiger snakes, emus, etc. – and found in many of them, the same patterns were there. Read the rest of this entry »